During semi-automatic translation of Princeton English WordNet (PWN) into Korean verbs, we noticed that the verbs of accusativity/inaccusativity alternation in English were mapped to two or more Korean verbs of different morpho-syntactic features and thus different senses. These mismatches in mapping show the need for reconstructing the lexical semantic structure of PWN for Korean verb wordnet,...

During the Root Infinitive (RI) stage children produce both stative and eventive finite verbs, but their non-finite verbs are restricted to eventive predicates (Hoekstra & Hyams, 1998; Wijnen, 1997). This Eventivity Constraint (EC) holds cross-linguistically – for RIs in Dutch, German, French, and Russian, ‘bare perfectives’ in Greek, bare participles (participles without an auxiliary) in Itali...

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be ...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

A hallmark of the English verb lexicon is the availability of multiple argument realization options for many English verbs. Studies of the English verb lexicon have drawn attention to one facet of this phenomenon: the availability of a range of object alternations (Levin 1993)—alternate realizations of the VP-internal arguments of apparently triadic verbs. One of the best-known of these alterna...

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, wh...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

Traditionally, the term serial verb construction refers to a sequence of verbs or verb phrases in a sentence in which there is no intervening conjunction. The English expression go eat, for example, might be considered as a kind of serial verb construction since there is no infinitive or other morphosyntactic marker present to indicate a coordinating or subordinating relationship between the tw...